Jacob Dove Basker was born in 1970 in the Bronx. He didn’t really grow up in New York , more like all over the northern U.S., including places like Moscow (Idaho) and Chicago; But he feels most at home in Seattle. It was there that he jammed with Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam) and formed a band with Chad Channing (Nirvana) and Ben Shepard (Soundgarden). Jake was 14 when he played his first show ever in Spokane with his freshly formed College-Punk combo out of Pullman, Washington.

Jake left America in 1990 to get a different perspective on the first gulf war, started by the first Bush. He arrived with 500 dollars, which he managed to stretch over six months using his exotic charm, Henry Miller style.

He then discovered the Hamburg Art College (Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg) and stayed there until he emerged with an official-looking slip of paper from the state, officially extolling him as a bona fide artist. This enabled him to become a New Media trollop for a stint, although Jake has always been more of a jack of all trades. Trades like comic artist, tattoo artist, animator, niceguy and wiseguy.

But the music has always been the vehicle to propel him down the endless one way street that is life. He played in several bands, including a Sonic Youth-like artpunk band in Hamburg for years (always with a different name), and was the first singer of "Ninos con Bombas" (who threw him out due to excessive vocal weirdness but still remain friends).

Jake started rapping in 1992 as his alter ego M.C. Eye, at a time when white rappers were still pariahs (with very few exceptions- ones like MC 900 Ft Jesus… hmm, does anyone else see a spiritual likeness between these two?), first under the patronage of the tough gals of drum and bass, “Die Patinnen”, then with the “Jonas Schoen Sextett” and as the leader of the Jazz rap combo “M.C. Eye & Blind Jazz”.

But it was in the Hamburg hiphop training camp “Trainingslager” that Jake learned to freestyle from his mentor/buddy/adopted son Mad Maxamom. The cross-styling also started soon thereafter, also with Max and with beatboxer Mark Boombastik in a band called “No Berlin No”, a trashpunkmetalrap band that made it a rule never to practice and still managed to entertain guests on stage like Peaches, Gonzales, and Maxwell from the “Meteorites”. Mark is seen again with Felix Kubin in Jake’s “other” band, “Anaerobic Robots”, of which the studio recordings still lie dormant on Felix’s hard drive.

Seeing as how Jake hails from the incubator of modern capitalism, it makes perfect sense that he let himself be playfully marketed as a product two years ago. The design agency Redesigndeutschland chose Jake as their guerilla-marketing posterboy ands attempted harbinger of peace (drop beats, not bombs), thus jettisoning him to regional fame, and eventually a damned record deal! Many concerts later people wearing Jake masks in Hamburg and Berlin were no rare occurrence (in one case every member of the band “Plokk” performed wearing them). It was actually a time when both cities were pitching for the privilege of presenting our portly protagonist, but in the end another was to win: Dusseldorf, home of Combination Records, that offered to not only satisfy our rolling rogue with copies of his own record, but to supply fans all over the world with his long awaited tour de force.